Sorry to Bother You: Boots Riley on Messaging
You have to love Boots Riley. Not just because he lives in Oakland, but because he’s been fighting for what he believes in since he worked to organize California farm workers when he was 15. Front man for a leftist hip-hop group known as the Coup? That doesn’t hurt either.
Riley is a rapper, activist, producer. But he also gets messaging. And that has a lot to do with how he created a killer pitch to sell a movie. In this case, his new dark, political, screwball comedy called Sorry to Bother You. Which is a brilliant title that works at so many levels, and particularly captures the innocence of the movie’s initially broke and stoned hero, Cassius Green.
The fact that this movie got made at all is a testament to Riley’s ability to hurl himself at the universe. After he wrote the screenplay, he went to work on a three-stage pitch that he honed to less than 100 words. It’s the perfect paradigm for pitching any project.
Boots knew exactly what he was up against. He was a musician with a movie script and he needed to find a couple of name actors and a few million dollars. Not a surefire path to making your first movie.
His first job: capture the attention of potential actors, producers and investors. He needed to grab them at the very beginning. If they laughed and said, “OK, tell me more,” he knew he had them. This is how the pitch began:
“It’s an absurdist dark comedy with magical realism and science fiction, inspired by the world of telemarketing. It’s called ‘Sorry to Bother You.’ “
The job of the next piece of messaging? Pull them in.
“Cassius Green is a black telemarketer with self-esteem issues and existential angst who discovers a magical way to make his voice sound like it’s overdubbed by a white actor.”
Okay, you’ve got me. Tell me more.
“This catapults him up the ladder of telemarketing success, to the upper echelon of telemarketers, who sell weapons of mass destruction and slave labor via cold calling. In order to do this, he has to betray his friends who are organizing a telemarketers’ union.”
That was the pitch. After six years of hustling the idea to everyone who would talk to him, the project finally started coming together in late 2015 — thanks in part to Dave Eggers, who published the screenplay as a McSweeney’s book in December, 2014. A few weeks after it opened in July, 2018, Sorry to Bother You had already grossed over $10 million at the box office. Not bad for a movie that cost a little over $3 million to make.
What’s in this story for you? Learn from Boots’ messaging discipline: this never would have happened without it. All you have to remember is that there are three parts to the pitch: Set ’em up, pull ’em in, make ’em ask for more. And one more thing. Keep it all under 100 words.
